Retinotopic connectivity maps of human visual cortex with unconstrained eye movements

Tangtartharakul, Gene, Morgan, Catherine A., Rushton, Simon ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8161-4095 and Schwarzkopf, Samuel 2023. Retinotopic connectivity maps of human visual cortex with unconstrained eye movements. Human Brain Mapping 44 (16) , pp. 5221-5237. 10.1002/hbm.26446

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Abstract

Human visual cortex contains topographic visual field maps whose organization can be revealed with retinotopic mapping. Unfortunately, constraints posed by standard mapping hinder its use in patients, atypical subject groups, and individuals at either end of the lifespan. This severely limits the conclusions we can draw about visual processing in such individuals. Here, we present a novel data-driven method to estimate connective fields, resulting in fine-grained maps of the functional connectivity between brain areas. We find that inhibitory connectivity fields accompany, and often surround facilitatory fields. The visual field extent of these inhibitory subfields falls off with cortical magnification. We further show that our method is robust to large eye movements and myopic defocus. Importantly, freed from the controlled stimulus conditions in standard mapping experiments, using entertaining stimuli and unconstrained eye movements our approach can generate retinotopic maps, including the periphery visual field hitherto only possible to map with special stimulus displays. Generally, our results show that the connective field method can gain knowledge about retinotopic architecture of visual cortex in patients and participants where this is at best difficult and confounded, if not impossible, with current methods.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Publisher:	Wiley Open Access
ISSN:	1065-9471
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	14 August 2023
Date of Acceptance:	26 July 2023
Last Modified:	24 Oct 2023 12:38
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/161702

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